Philip Roth - Everyman

Now he sat beside her on the bed and took her hand in his, thinking: When you are young, it's the outside of the body that matters, how you look externally. When you get older, it's what's inside that matters, and people stop caring how you look.

"Don't you have some medication you can take?" he asked her.

"I took it," she said. "I can't take any more. It doesn't help but for a few hours anyway. Nothing helps. I've had three operations. Each one is more extensive than the last and more harrowing than the last, and each one makes the pain worse. I'm sorry I'm in such a state. I apologize for this."

Near her head on the bed was a back brace she'd removed in order to lie down. It consisted of a white plastic shell that fit across the lower spine and attached to a web of elasticized cloth and Velcro straps that fastened snugly over the stomach an oblong piece of felt-lined canvas. Though she remained in her white painting smock, she had removed the brace and tried to push it out of sight under a pillow when he opened the door and walked in, which was why it was up by her head and impossible not to be continually mindful of while they talked. It was only a standard back brace, worn under the outer clothing, whose plastic posterior section was no more than eight or nine inches high, and yet it spoke to him of the perpetual nearness in their affluent retirement village of illness and death.

"Would you like a glass of water?" he asked her.

He could see by looking into her eyes how difficult the pain was to bear. "Yes," she said weakly, "yes, please."

Her husband, Gerald Kramer, had been the owner, publisher, and editor of a county weekly, the leading local paper, that did not shy away from exposing corruption in municipal government up and down the shore. He remembered Kramer, who'd grown up a slum kid in nearby Neptune, as a compact, bald, opinionated man who walked with considerable swagger, played aggressive, ungainly tennis, owned a little Cessna, and ran a discussion group once a week on current events – the most popular evening event on the Starfish Beach calendar along with the screenings of old movies sponsored by the film society – until he was felled by brain cancer and was to be seen being pushed around the village streets in a wheelchair by his wife. Even in retirement he'd continued to have the air of an omnipotent being dedicated all his life to an important mission, but in those eleven months before he died he seemed pierced by bewilderment, dazed by his diminishment, dazed by his helplessness, dazed to think that the dying man enfeebled in a wheelchair – a man no longer able to smash a tennis ball, to sail a boat, to fly a plane, let alone to edit a page of the Monmouth County Bugle – could answer to his name. One of his dashing eccentricities was, for no special reason, to dress up from time to time in his tuxedo to partake of the veal scaloppine at the village restaurant with his wife of fifty-odd years. "Where the hell else am I going to wear it?" was the gruffly engaging explanation that went out to one and all – he could sometimes woo people with an unexpected charm. After the surgery, however, his wife had to sit beside him and wait for him to crookedly open his mouth and then feed him gingerly, the swaggering husband, the roughneck gallant, with a spoon. Many people knew Kramer and admired him and out on the street wanted to say hello and ask after his health, but often his wife had to shake her head to warn them away when he was in the depths of his despondency – the vitriolic despondency of one once assertively in the middle of everything who was now in the middle of nothing. Was himself now nothing, nothing but a motionless cipher angrily awaiting the blessing of an eradication that was absolute.

"You can continue to lie here if you like," he said to Millicent Kramer after she had drunk some of the water.

"I can't be lying down all the time!" she cried. "I just cannot do it anymore! I was so agile, I was so active – if you were Gerald's wife, you had to be. We went everywhere. I felt so free. We went to China, we went all over Africa. Now I can't even take the bus to New York unless I'm laced to the gills with painkillers. And I'm not good with the painkillers – they make me completely crazy. And by the time I get there I'm in pain anyway. Oh, I'm sorry about this. I'm terribly sorry. Everybody here has their ordeal. There's nothing special about my story and I'm sorry to burden you with it. You probably have a story of your own."

"Would a heating pad help?" he asked.

"You know what would help?" she said. "The sound of that voice that's disappeared. The sound of the exceptional man I loved. I think I could take all this if he were here. But I can't without him. I never saw him weaken once in his life – then came the cancer and it crushed him. I'm not Gerald. He would just marshal all his forces and do it – marshal all his everything and do whatever it was that had to be done. But I can't. I can't take the pain anymore. It overrides everything. I think sometimes that I can't go on another hour. I tell myself to ignore it. I tell myself it doesn't matter. I tell myself, 'Don't engage it. It's a specter. It's an annoyance, it's nothing more than that. Don't accord it power. Don't cooperate with it. Don't take the bait. Don't respond. Muscle through. Barrel through. Either you're in charge or it's in charge – the choice is yours!' I repeat this to myself a million times a day, as though I'm Gerald speaking, and then suddenly it's so awful I have to lie down on the floor in the middle of the supermarket and all the words are meaningless. Oh, I'm sorry, truly. I abhor tears." "We all do," he told her, "but we cry anyway." "This class has meant so much to me," she said. "I spend the whole week waiting for it. I'm like a schoolkid about this class," she confessed, and he found her looking at him with a childish trust, as though she were indeed a little one being put to sleep – and he, like Gerald, could right anything.

"Do you have any of your medication with you?" he asked.

"I already took one this morning."

"Take another," he told her.

"I have to be so careful with those pills."

"I understand. But do yourself a favor and take another now. One more can't do much harm, and it'll get you over the hump. It'll get you back to the easel."

"It takes an hour for it to work. The class will be over."

"You're welcome to stay and keep painting after the others go. Where is the medication?"

"In my purse. In the studio. By my easel. The old brown bag with the worn shoulder strap."

He brought it to her, and with what was left of the water in the glass, she took the pill, an opiate that killed pain for three or four hours, a large, white lozenge-shaped pill that caused her to relax with the anticipation of relief the instant she swallowed it. For the first time since she'd begun the class he could see unmistakably how attractive she must have been before the degeneration of an aging spine took charge of her life.

"Lie here until it starts to work," he said. "Then come join the class."

"I do apologize for all this," she said as he was leaving. "It's just that pain makes you so alone." And here the fortitude gave way again and left her sobbing into her hands. "It's so shameful."

"There's nothing shameful about it."

"There is, there is," she wept. "The not being able to look after oneself, the pathetic need to be comforted…"

"In the circumstances, none of that is remotely shameful."

"You're wrong. You don't know. The dependence, the helplessness, the isolation, the dread – it's all so ghastly and shameful. The pain makes you frightened of yourself. The utter otherness of it is awful."

She's embarrassed by what she's become, he thought, embarrassed, humiliated, humbled almost beyond her own recognition. But which of them wasn't? They were all embarrassed by what they'd become. Wasn't he? By the physical changes. By the diminishment of virility. By the errors that had contorted him and the blows – both those self-inflicted and those from without – that deformed him. What lent a horrible grandeur to the process of reduction suffered by Millicent Kramer – and miniaturized by comparison the bleakness of his own – was, of course, the intractable pain. Even those pictures of the grandchildren, he thought, those photographs that grandparents have all over the house, she probably doesn't even look at anymore. Nothing anymore but the pain.